On April 7, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran. On April 21—one day before the ceasefire was set to expire—he posted a statement on Truth Social announcing that the ceasefire would be extended indefinitely.

Subsequently, Reuters, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Wall Street Journal all reported the ceasefire extension. Iran’s foreign minister tweeted acknowledging the decision to extend the ceasefire.

In the real world, the ceasefire has continued under tight lockdown conditions.

But on Polymarket, in the market “Will the US-Iran ceasefire be extended before April 22?”, the probability of “Yes” is currently 0.1%.

In other words, everyone knows the ceasefire has been extended, but on the world’s largest prediction market, people think the ceasefire has not been extended.

Controversial markets like this one at this point in time often attract bets that expect 100x or even higher returns: some traders bet $1—sometimes even as much as hundreds of dollars—trying to create a get-rich-quick myth.

And within the past 24 hours, an account bought $100,000 worth of “Yes,” with potential gains of over $50 million.

Will the ceasefire truly be extended after the officials step in to change the rules?

The controversy around this market has been embedded in the rules from the very beginning.

Polymarket’s definition of “ceasefire extension” is: both the US and Iran must make clear, explicit public statements, or there must be “a consensus of overwhelmingly credible media reports.” The US public statement came from Trump himself, on Truth Social.

The problem lies with Iran. Iran’s official wording used “acknowledged,” not the “mutually agreed” required by the rules.

It was precisely this wording that caused a divergence of up to $150 million in trading volume on this market: holders of “Yes” believe that Trump’s statement combined with unanimous global media coverage already constitutes “overwhelming consensus”; holders of “No” argue that Iran did not directly confirm in its own name, so the condition was not met.

On April 24, Polymarket’s official team directly intervened and added a clarification on the market page: as of 23:59 on April 22, there is no ceasefire extension that meets the “Yes” condition.

With official endorsement, market sentiment flipped sharply, and the probability rapidly dropped to below 1%.

What followed was a wave of late-session traders who are well-versed in game mechanics and trading strategies: under the official determination, buying “No” had already become an almost risk-free, high-yield form of investment.

Among these traders, the top three “No” holders include an account called NotBakerMcKenzie, placing a bet of about $8.5 million. Baker McKenzie is a top global law firm headquartered in Chicago that specializes in providing compliance legal services for prediction market clients such as Polymarket. It has deep understanding of oracle settlement mechanisms and platform rules.

Interpreting the rules in the capacity of a law firm and backing it with real money seems like a way of signaling to the entire trading community the direction in which this market’s final settlement is headed.

However, the top “Yes” holder, Pedro, clearly takes the opposite view. Polymarket’s official statement can only be treated as a reference for settlement; the actual outcome is determined solely by the UMA decentralized oracle voting. As long as UMA token stakers’ vote results support “Yes,” what the official says does not matter.

This is exactly what Pedro is betting on: compared with the potential payout of over $50 million, risking $100,000 to bet on a surprising oracle voting outcome is highly worthwhile.

Oracle Attack Worth $50 Million

On the homepage of Pedro’s Polymarket account, there is a link that leads to a website for a token he issued himself—$pedros-coin. Although the website is full of half-finished architecture and rough page design, the token’s design rules are very eye-catching.

$pedros-coin cannot be purchased using the usual meme-style rules. The only way to obtain it is through actions: watch a live stream to earn 1 coin per hour; post content on social media to earn 20 coins per post—every acquisition method is tightly bound to online distribution.

And the token’s value depends entirely on what the market’s “Yes” probability for whether the ceasefire is extended is. If the probability is 100%, then each token is worth $1. If the final settlement ends up being “No,” then the token is worthless.

Pedro’s position in this market also perfectly functions as a payout guarantee for the token—he holds 50 million “Yes” shares, with potential payouts exceeding $50 million. He only has money available to redeem if he wins.

Putting these features together, the logic of this design becomes clear: Pedro uses $pedros-coin to bind the interests of hundreds of people to his “Yes” position, prompting them to keep speaking out across the entire internet. The goal is to generate enough public pressure before the oracle vote, so that as many stakers as possible will believe that this market “should settle as Yes.”

In terms of narrative, this mobilization mechanism has a strange kind of web3 spirit: Pedro invests more than $100,000 of his own real money and leads retail traders to unite around a token earned through actions, fighting the established reality where large holders sweep up with capital. Moreover, the direction they bet on in reality does correspond to an actual ceasefire.

But something else appears in Pedro’s Discord channel, making the whole matter less pure.

A Fooling-Acting Pedro and an Oracle Whale Who Manipulates the Market with Clear Pricing

On the morning of April 30, a user called Euan posted a message in the Discord channel that appears on Pedro’s personal webpage: “As you can see, I own the richest UMA wallet. I’m willing to accept bribes to manipulate the vote to be ‘Yes.’ DMs open.”

Attached next to the message were two screenshots: one showing that 2.9 million UMA tokens were held, and the other showing a page for an account named borntoolate.eth.

The 2.9 million UMA tokens account for about 16.4% of the current total staked amount of 17.71 million.

Just this one screenshot is already enough to be intimidating. And for players who have been around Polymarket for years, the name borntoolate carries weight that isn’t any less than the 16.4% figure.

In March 2025, the Polymarket market “Will Ukraine agree to Trump’s mineral resource deal before the end of March,” even though negotiations were still ongoing and there was no official signing, was settled by oracle voting as “Yes.”

That was the infamous Polymarket oracle attack that caused a sensation. The mastermind behind it was borntoolate. With overall voting participation not particularly high, borntoolate pushed the outcome forcibly toward “Yes” by holding and staking a large amount of UMA tokens, leveraging relative weight to drive the market in a direction that was completely at odds with the facts.

The core assumption of UMA’s security model is that “the cost of an attack is higher than the rewards from an attack”—attackers need to buy enough UMA tokens to control the vote, and this cost should exceed whatever gains they could get from the attack. Yet the total market value of the entire UMA protocol is currently only $40 million.

We cannot verify whether Euan is truly borntoolate himself. But if this round’s settlement result gets flipped again, Pedro’s $100,000 bet will yield a return of more than $50 million.

As of now, the results of the UMA oracle vote appear to be quite clear. Among tokens with votes that have already been made public, there are more than 10.27 million “No” votes, while only 25 “Yes” votes exist.

The only variable in this vote is the ownership of approximately 8.69 million UMA tokens whose votes have not yet been disclosed. If more than 2.33 million of those votes are “No,” this round’s vote will be considered to have reached consensus, and the market will settle as “No.” If it does not reach that threshold, this round’s vote will be deemed invalid, and the dispute will continue into the next round—that is exactly the window Pedro is waiting for.

As of the time of writing, Pedro is still continuing to buy “Yes” shares.

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